2024 in six graphs
What a year
Lots of things happened in 2024, but we can summarize the key trends in the following charts.
Top gaming tokens did not perform well.
Looking at the largest gaming tokens in terms of their market cap, only five of the top 14 saw their price increase during 2024. Community memecoin SUPER was the only token to see significant price growth — up 114%.
Lots of tokens launched but most performed badly.
2024 saw the launch of dozens of new (small cap) gaming tokens, especially in the first half of the year. However, the best performing new tokens came from projects which launched in the second half of the year, of which five saw their price increase by more than 200%. This growth was mainly driven by the change in crypto sentiment following Donald Trump’s election victory in November.
Newer tokens did better over long timeframes too.
Looking more generally at all gaming tokens, the vast majority of the top performers during 2024 were launched in 2024. Basically, the newer the token, the better its performance was likely to be. Older projects are not capturing current imaginations.
TON gaming tokens didn’t perform any better.
One of 2024’s big trends was the rise of Telegram and its TON blockchain as a strong marketing channel for simple crypto games. However, with the exception of the original NOT memecoin, gaming tokens on TON did not demonstrate positive price dynamics.
Ronin was the #1 chain for gaming. Its tokens performed badly.
Within the gaming sector, the Ronin blockchain was generally considered to have the strongest ecosystem. However, most of its games’ tokens performed badly, even Pixels, which was the most popular game of 2024 in terms of its daily activity.
But tokens related to AI performed spectacularly well.
In stark comparison, the performance of AI-related memecoins and tokens launched by AI agents through platforms such as Virtuals saw explosive price growth during December.
Many saw their prices rising more than 10-fold, with Virtuals being the top performer, with its price up 34,130% — 342-fold — during 2024.
Clearly, the attempt to integrate this meta into gaming will be the one that will dominate the opening months of 2025; something we’re already seeing from the likes of Today, Planet Mojo, Goat Gaming, Faraway Games and Parallel.
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Calendar
Xterio’s XTER TGE — 8th January
Soccerverse season 1 launches — 9th January
Goat Gaming’s season 2 ends — 15th January
Forkast’s TGE on Ronin — 28th January
In case you want more detail about what happened in 2024, here’s 58 minutes of detailed analysis.
Additional Links
The first big gaming token launch of 2024 — XTER — is already running into trouble, with KOL Grail saying that “At Xterio Games, community rhymes with 'exit liquidity'.” Ouch!
KOL Apix invested angel-invested $100,000 into web3 games in 2024. How’s he been getting on across investments he describes as “not smart and mostly due to fomo”.
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